Category: Retail

News about the most important season for the retail industry follows a predictable pattern: initial forecasts of robust sales, confused but generally optimistic noise as holiday shopping gets underway, the beginning of doubts at the end, followed by disappointing reality come February. I make no predictions. But here are six charts that show us where we…

“Are you ready for the holidays?” If another person asks me that, I’m going to wrap them in a bow. I’m still mentally back in the catch-up from September. But here we are: Black Friday looms. The unemployment rate has fallen from 7 percent last November to 5.8 percent. The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index is…

It is too early to know how the holiday retail season turns out, but some early indicators are not good. According to the National Retail Federation, sales through the entire Black Friday weekend actually declined by 3.9 percent compared with the same period last year.

The data will be noisy until after the first of next year, but some metrics are clear.

People who want to be citizens instead of “consumers” face a conundrum during the hyper-commercialized holiday shopping season. America consumes more than it produces, adding to greenhouse gasses through the 10,000-mile supply chain and killing jobs through the trade deficit. The temptation is to drop out.

But we want to give gifts. Not only that, but the economy is heavily dependent on consumer spending (although not, technically, 70 percent, because that includes health care expenditures).

In other words, your spending helps pay for my job and likely vice versa. Performance during the holidays can make the difference whether your favorite stores stay open or not.

Still, people can choose responsibly where their spending goes. They can shop at locally owned small businesses, or chains that pay decent wages and offer real benefits to their employees. Get on “the tubes” and do some research.

Retailers won’t really know how the critical holiday shopping season turns out until early next year. But we can take some unscientific soundings in today’s poll: Take Our PollTake Our PollTake Our Poll Today’s Econ Haiku: Vulture capital Has a new critic circling A bird named Francis

The urban Targetstore opening in downtown Seattle marks an important future direction for the chain. While suburban big boxes and shopping strips were devastated by the Great Recession, many central cores have been doing well. It’s also a vote of confidence in downtown Seattle.

There are risks to the scenario, as economists like to say. Population has grown as a percentage more downtown since 2005 than in Seattle, King County or Washington. Amazon.com’s headquarters, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Russell Investments and the South Lake Union biomedical cluster have all added to the confidence. Still, employment was badly hurt by the closing of Washington Mutual’s headquarters and the destruction of the ecosystem of vendors, law firms, CPAs, etc. that depended on it.

Taxable retail sales downtown plunged during the recession and failed to recover as they did elsewhere in the metro area and state, starting in 2009. Taxable sales in arts, entertainment, sports and accommodations also took a big hit and are losing market share (NBA arena, anyone?). The data are completely not up to date, but it’s clear downtown has challenges.

I’ve been out among the crowd this morning at Westlake Park awaiting the Macy’s parade. An informal survey says many plan to stick around and look, maybe even shop. Black Friday is a constuct of the retail industry but it doesn’t give a good picture of the overall shopping season. And even that can mislead. As NYU economist Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini cautioned today, “Retail sales provide biased measure of consumption spending by households as they are sharply cutting back discretionary service spending.”

So how’s that recovery working out for you? According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, e-commerce retail sales rose in the first quarter to reach a record of $46 billion. That compares with $5 billion in 2000.

Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, owner of the former Washington Mutual, the recovery has reached a “self-sustaining” level. That, at least, is what he told shareholders at the annual meeting today.

And yet Wal-Mart, the bellwether of middle America, showed a more mixed picture. Profits rose 3 percent, beating Wall Street expectations, but the retail giant’s troubles continue. U.S. same-store sales, which track stores that have been open a year or more and is a better yardstick of performance, fell 1.1 percent.

I was interested in the interview of leasing agent Maria Royer by the Seattle Times’ Amy Martinez. Royer focuses on the Pike-Pine corridor in downtown Seattle and lately has brought in AllSaints, H&M and Forever 21.

The fact that Seattle even has a star leasing agent successfully working one part of a vibrant downtown is remarkable. The fact that downtown Seattle retail survived and bounced back from the Great Recession is testimony to how special this city is, and what an asset it has in downtown. This is not to be smug — “downtown is never done,” as someone said — but most American cities would kill for the downtown retail Seattle residents take for granted.

Downtown retail started dying in the late 1950s in most American cities as cheap gas, suburbanization and the shopping mall displaced traditional central business districts. Cities that entirely lost their downtown shopping districts have found it incredibly difficult to restore them, even with the downtown renaissance that began in the late 1980s. For example, downtown Dallas has added thousands of new residents and brought some large office tenants back from the suburbs, but it struggles on the retail front aside from the flagship Neiman Marcus store. Seattle is very fortunate that it never reached this tipping point.